A moment’s silence, then: “You are sure Monsieur Spence must come this way? There is no other road by which he can reach his home?”

“Of course not,” I answered shortly. “He lives out in the new Weiss development with his mother and sister—you were there this evening—and this is the only direct motor route to the subdivision from the city.”

“Ah, that is well,” he replied, hitching the collar of his greatcoat higher about his ears. “You will recognize his car—surely?”

“I’ll try to,” I promised, “but you can’t be sure of anything on a night like this. I’d not guarantee to pick out my own—there’s somebody pulling up beside the road now,” I interrupted myself as a roadster came to an abrupt halt and stood panting, its headlights forming vague, luminous spots in the haze.

“Mais oui,” he agreed, “and no one stops at this spot for any good until It has been conquered. Come, let us investigate.” He started forward, body bent, head advanced, like a motion picture conception of an Indian on the warpath.

Half a hundred stealthy steps brought us abreast of the parked car. Its occupant was sitting back on the driving seat, his hands resting listlessly on the steering wheel, his eyes upturned, as though he saw a vision in the trailing wisps of fog before him. I needed no second glance to recognize Alvin Spence, though the rapt look upon his white, set face transfigured it almost beyond recognition. He was like a poet beholding the beatific vision of his mistress or a medieval eremite gazing through the opened portals of Paradise.

“A-a-ah!” de Grandin’s whisper cut like a wire-edged knife through the silence of the fog-bound air, “do you behold it, Friend Trowbridge?”

“Wha—” I whispered back, but broke the syllable half uttered. Thin, tenuous, scarcely to be distinguished from the lazily drifting festoons of the fog itself, there was a something in midair before the car where Alvin Spence sat with his yearning soul looking from his eyes. I seemed to see clear through the thing, yet its outlines were plainly perceptible, and as I looked and looked again, I recognized the unmistakable features of Dorothy Spence, the young man’s dead wife. Her body—if the tenuous, ethereal mass of static vapor could be called such—was bare of clothing and seemed endued with a voluptuous grace and allure the living woman had never possessed, but her face was that of the young woman who had lain in Rosedale Cemetery for three-quarters of a year. If ever living man beheld the simulacrum of the dead, we three gazed on the wraith of Dorothy Spence that moment.

“Dorothy—my beloved, my dear, my dear!” the man half whispered, half sobbed, stretching forth his hands to the spirit-woman, then falling back on the seat as the vision seemed to elude his grasp when a sudden puff of breeze stirred the fog.